ORIGINAL STORY: Ever since actor Cory Monteith died of a drug overdose in July, fans of the TV series Glee wondered how the show would deal with his death. His death has been especially hard on everyone in the cast considering that they have just pushed him to go back to high-profile celebrity drug rehab centers last spring. Likewise, Monteith played Finn, who was arguably the lead character alongside Rachel — who was played by Monteith’s real-life girlfriend Lea Michele — it certainly needed to be addressed in some way. He couldn’t simply disappear, and it would be in bad taste to suddenly have the character played by an actor who looked similar to Monteith.

Series creator Ryan Murphy said that the series would feature a memorial episode for Finn, but there was no word how they would explain the character’s passing. Would art mimic life and say there was a drug overdose? It was a series plot point that Finn’s birth father had actually died from one, so would art imitate life?

Now on Deadline, Murphy says they won’t be explaining how Finn died at all; at least, not yet.

There were a lot of things that we had to decide — how are we going to deal with his death? At one point, we were going to have his character die after an accidental drug overdose — that was something we had considered. But we have decided that we’re not going to have him pass from that. Basically, what we’re doing in the episode is we are not telling you yet, or maybe not at all, how that character died. The idea being, how somebody died is interesting and maybe morbid, but we say very early on in the episode, “This episode is about a celebration of that character’s life.” That might be weird for some people, but it felt really exploitative to do it any other way.

Murphy goes on to say that the real challenge will come when they shoot the actual episode, which starts this week. Ultimately, he says, the focus for the cast and crew, and the fans, is to have a moment to grieve. “We loved Cory and we loved Finn and it feels like a huge loss and a huge heartache not to have either of them around. We’re trying to craft an episode that’s not just about us grieving but about a lot of the young fans grieving.”